Seeing is believing, or at least so the old adage goes. But is it? Because despite how tempting it would be to believe that if you can’t see, hear or touch something, it doesn’t exist, there have been thousands upon thousands of people who seem certain that they have in fact witnessed or even come into direct contact with things science just can’t explain and that there is sometimes absolutely no evidence for. UFOs. Ghosts. Chupacabras. Do they exist? And if not, why have there been so many sightings and close experiences? Paranormal Day is all about trying to answer these questions.
The History of Paranormal Day
People have been claiming to have seen or experienced things that were impossible to explain for millennia; however, these reports have only been documented for the past few hundred years. American writer Charles Fort is perhaps the best-known collector of paranormal anecdotes, and he is considered by many as the father of modern paranormalism, or the study of the paranormal. Fort compiled at least 40,000 notes on unexplained paranormal experiences.
Reported events that he collected include teleportation (a term Fort is actually credited with coining), poltergeist events, falls of frogs, fishes, and inorganic materials of an amazing range, crop circles, unaccountable noises and explosions, spontaneous combustions, levitation, unidentified flying objects, and mysterious appearances and disappearances, to name but a few.
He is also most likely the first person to explain strange human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis of alien abduction, an idea that has definitely caught on, with hundreds of such reports being filed every year. Despite the extremely wide variety of these paranormal events, they all have something very important in common: they lack the reproducibility of empirical evidence, and they are not amenable to scientific investigation.
Paranormal Day was created in 2013 to help us give some thought to the things we do not know in hopes of learning more about the universe we live in with all its dimensions, oddities, and great unknowns.
How to celebrate Paranormal Day
There are lots of fun and interesting ways to spend this day. If you’re a fan of scary movies, you’re in loads of luck because ghosts, unidentifiable monsters and aliens are among the most popular horror movie topics in existence. In fact, there is even a movie you may have heard of titled Paranormal Activity about a couple witnessing increasingly disturbing paranormal occurrences in their house. You may have never thought a sheet could be scary, but you may well change your mind after and evening spent watching this movie in the dark!
Other good horror flicks about paranormal events include The Babadook, an impressively moving Australian production, and the mother of all found footage horror films, the positively chilling Blair Witch Project. Another interesting way to spend this day would be to find out about some of the reports about paranormal occurrences that happened near you, in you city or town or area,
Just don’t let yourself get carried away if you find out anything a little creepy about your area—it’s not true anyway…right? What is the creepiest story about the paranormal that you’ve heard? Or maybe you’ve experienced something unexplainable, yourself? Let us know in the comments so we can all enjoy the chills and attempt to unravel the mystery, and have a great Paranormal Day!
